Highly deteriorated US road infrastructure, major budgetary restrictions and the significant growth in traffic have led to an emerging need for improving performance of highway maintenance practices. Privatizing some portions of road maintenance operations by state Departments of Transportation...

We estimate the efficiency of groundwater use in cotton production in the Punjab province of Pakistan. We use a survey data of 189 cotton producers comprising 98 tube-well owners and 91 water buyers in order to get the differential impact of tube-well ownership on groundwater use efficiency. We...

Increasing energy efficiency and exploiting energy saving potential are two important practices that can help to ensure future energy security in China. This paper proposes a new total factor energy efficiency indicator, based on the directional meta-frontier data envelopment analysis (DEA)...

This study uses the concept of meta-frontier function to examine the technical efficiency and varietal-gap of rice production in Nigeria. A random sample of 675 farmers was selected from three out six geographical zones in Nigeria. The farmers in this study were classified into three groups...

We estimate the efficiency of groundwater use in cotton production in the Punjab province of Pakistan. We use a survey data of 189 cotton producers comprising 98 tube-well owners and 91 water buyers in order to get the differential impact of tube-well ownership on groundwater use efficiency. We...

The telecommunications industry has a great ripple effect on the overall national economy. However, there is no consensus about what is the optimal regulation policy for the telecommunications industry. Regulations on the telecommunications industry are different by region (i.e. United States,...

Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

This paper measures environmental productivity in 70 countries over the period 1981–2007. Differences in green (environmental) productivity growth across countries under distinct country specific production frontier are measured using directional distance function model, which incorporates...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional productivity differentials on dairy farms in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Several methods have been suggested for analysing productivity differentials in agriculture between groups of farms or countries. Hayami [5] and Hayami and Ruttan [7]...